On 1/21/23 14:13, Thomas A. Schmitz via ntg-context wrote:
Hi Pablo,
thanks for this; it is very informative and clear. Just one short remark and one correction:
Many thanks for your review and your correction, Thomas.
1. "Before 1982, Greek ort[h]ography was polytonic." That's a bit of an oversimplification.
Many thanks for noticing the typo in “orthography”. The sentence you quote, it is an oversimplification (altough “from 1500” is also “before 1982” 😅). I’m afraid I didn’t find the right way to describe the difference between polytonic and monotonic systems. I wanted to break the common misconception “if contemporary Greek is monotonic, polytonic orthography is ancient Greek”. Either I’m totally missing the whole question, or it is plainly wrong that polytonic means ancient Greek (although ancient Greek is polytonic).
[...] 2. I think it would be worth pointing out that unfortunately, Greek lowercase letters with acute accent occur separately in two unicode blocks: the combinations in U+03AC-U+03AF and U+03CC-U+03CF ("Greek small letter X with tonos") are functionally identical to the combinations in the U+1F7 block ("Greek small letter X with acute accent").
Many thanks for pointing this out. I explicitly avoided, since it seems to me a tricky question. https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Greek#Monotonic_and_Acute_Accent is a way of putting it.
This is a source of confusion both in fonts and in programming, because some programs normalize these letters, so for string operations and searches, you may obtain surprising results.
“Charachter normalization” is tricky (for me, mainly with the Latin alphabet). https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Greek#On_“Character_Normalization” tries to explain this.
Thank you for the article!
Many thanks for your review, Pablo